Read A Lost Chapter Of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory

Read A Lost Chapter Of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory

Published in Saturday's Guardian Review, a lost chapter of Roald Dahl's famed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is yours to gobble up this holiday weekend. The chapter, titled "The Vanilla Fudge Room," illustrates a monstrous mountain of white fudge and a larger cast of characters not found in the story's final publication.

The chapter follows the familiar formula of many of the chapters in Dahl's tale: Unruly children become greedy and demanding, Wonka tells them no, the children say yes, and their missteps lead them to a grisly fate somewhere beneath the factory.

In most cases, Wonka could be counted on to stop his machines' gears from grinding before the bubbles hit the fan. Veruca Salt plummeting down a chute (destination: furnace) with other bad eggs certainly was disturbing, but we were assured she would be saved before meeting a fiery fate. But, this isn't the case in "The Vanilla Fudge Room."

This, presumably, is why the chapter was deemed "too wild, subversive, and insufficiently moral for the tender minds of British children almost 50 years ago," according to The Guardian.

In this new chapter, the two naughty boys take a tumble off a fudge mountain, falling into what Wonka calls "The Cutting and Pounding Room," where a machine "pounds [fudge] against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops." Wonka does not seem so certain that the process can be stopped before this frightening conclusion.

All of a sudden, being a giant blueberry forever doesn't sound so bad.